House passes GOP budget after conservative revolt collapses
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
By Catie Edmondson
The House on Thursday narrowly adopted a Republican budget blueprint for slashing taxes and government spending, after hard-line conservatives concerned that it would balloon the nation’s debt ended a revolt that had threatened to derail President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.
Approval of the plan, which was in doubt until nearly the very end, was a victory for Republican leaders and Trump. It allowed them to move forward with crafting major legislation to enact a huge tax cut, financed with deep reductions in spending on federal programs, and pushing it through Congress over Democratic opposition.
“President Trump’s promises will be fulfilled,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters just off the House floor shortly after the vote, “and we’re really excited that today we took a big step in getting that done.”
But approval came only after a mutiny on the House floor Tuesday night that underscored the deep divisions Republicans still have to bridge to push through what Trump has called his “big, beautiful bill.” It forced Johnson to delay a planned vote on the measure after he spent more than an hour Wednesday night huddled with the holdouts, trying without success to persuade them to support it.
The vote on Thursday was 216-214, with two Republicans opposing the measure. All Democrats present voted against the plan, which they said would pave the way for cuts to Medicaid and other vital safety net programs that would harm Americans, all to pay for large tax cuts for the wealthiest.
“You target earned benefits and things that are important to the American people, like Medicaid,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said, addressing Republicans. “And what are you doing it for? What is it in service of? All to pass massive tax breaks for your billionaire donors like Elon Musk.”
The measure’s fate had been in doubt for days before the vote, as anti-spending House Republicans warned that the plan would add too much to the nation’s debt and defied Trump’s entreaties to fall in line behind it.
The plan the Senate passed over the weekend directed committees in that chamber to find about $4 billion in spending cuts over a decade. That is a fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that were approved by the House, and conservatives there feared that if they agreed to the Senate’s measure, they would ultimately be forced to accept far smaller spending cuts than they want.
In the end, even though the skeptics had complained that the resolution violated their core principles, they were loath to cross Trump and set back his top legislative priority just months after their party won a governing trifecta. A defeat would have dealt party leaders a significant rebuke and sent them back to the drawing board to find another way to push through their fiscal plan.
“There was a lot of concern about the length of time that would add,” Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., said about changing the resolution. “The speaker has been saying that it is critical that we move forward now to meet his deadline, and all of our deadline, on passing the final reconciliation bill.”
The holdouts relented despite having failed to force any modifications to the measure. They agreed to support it after Johnson and Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the majority leader, said it was his conference’s “ambition” to find at least $1.5 trillion in cuts.
It was the latest instance of House Republicans caving to Trump on a critical issue. But in the days before the vote, normally reliable Trump allies displayed a remarkable degree of resistance to passing a measure that would allow their party to get started on his agenda. After a meeting Trump hosted at the White House on Tuesday failed to flip a critical number of holdouts, he began stepping up the public pressure on Republicans to back the blueprint.
“Close your eyes and get there; it’s a phenomenal bill,” Trump told lawmakers Tuesday night at a fundraising dinner in Washington. “Stop grandstanding.”
To move along the reconciliation process, which Republicans plan to use to push their budget and tax legislation through Congress strictly along party lines, the House and the Senate must adopt the same budget resolution.
But in addition to demanding more spending cuts than the Senate approved, conservatives in the House also were deeply skeptical of the Senate’s insistence that extending the tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing, because doing so maintains the status quo. Senate Republicans adopted that approach so they could extend the tax cuts indefinitely without appearing to balloon the deficit.
The holdouts said they were reassured after receiving the pledge from Thune and Senate Republicans that their chamber would produce deeper spending cuts than those laid out in the text of the resolution.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said in a lengthy statement that he had “reluctantly voted” for the measure only after receiving promises from Trump and party leaders that their budget legislation would include deep cuts to federal entitlement programs, including “a minimum of $1 trillion in real reductions in mandatory spending.” He said Trump had committed to “fully repeal” President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act as part of the plan, and to implement reforms to Medicaid “addressing eligibility, waste, fraud, abuse and the disastrous money laundering schemes pervasive in the program.”
Roy also said Johnson had “made a specific commitment to guarantee the House framework tying tax cuts to spending cuts.”
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